Some senior American military officers and a number of military commentators
are now saying that America's swift victory in the first phase of the war
with Iraq shows that the U.S. armed forces have learned the lessons John
Boyd tried to teach them. As someone who knew and worked with John Boyd,
I have to say, not so fast. There is a lot less here than meets the eye.

Boyd

Col. John Boyd, USAF, was undoubtedly the greatest military theorist America
has produced. An important part of his theoretical work dealt with what is
known as maneuver warfare or Third Generation warfare. Boyd argued that in
any conflict, each side goes through repeated cycles of Observing, Orienting,
Deciding, and Acting, Boyd's famous OODA Loop. Whoever can consistently go
through the OODA Loop faster than his adversary gains a decisive advantage.
This concept explains how and why maneuver warfare works, how it "gets
inside the other guy's mind," as Boyd liked to say.

Supposedly, the U.S. military got inside the OODA Loop of the Iraqi armed
forces during the recent campaign, thereby proving that they can do maneuver
warfare. This claim is, at best, premature. At present, we do not know why
the Iraqis did what they did, especially why the Republican Guard went home
rather than fight for Baghdad. Nor do we know how our own forces actually
operated. A few preliminary reports suggest the 1st Marine Division may indeed
have followed maneuver warfare concepts, echeloning its forces, using mission-type
orders, bypassing enemy strong points to keep up the speed of the attack,
etc. One of the Marine Corps' premier maneuverists, Brigadier General John
Kelly, is the Assistant Division Commander of 1st MAR DIV, so this is not
entirely surprising. In fact, 1st MAR DIV also followed maneuver warfare
precepts in the first Gulf War, under a very talented commander, General
Mike Myatt.

But one division's actions by no means prove that the Marine corps as a
whole has successfully internalized maneuver warfare. Nor does it say anything
about the Army's performance. The Army's Third Infantry Division, the campaign's
focus of effort (Schwerpunkt), did move quickly. But a Second Generation
force can also move quickly, if and when it has planned to do so. What it
generally cannot do is move quickly in response to unexpected threats and
opportunities. It does not have the cultural characteristics required to
do so, qualities John Boyd stressed such as decentralization, initiative
(and the tolerance for mistakes that must accompany initiative), trust up
and down the chain of command and reliance on self-discipline rather than
imposed discipline. Those characteristics are mighty hard to find in today's
United State's Army.

More fundamental still is the point that while the OODA Loop was an important
part of Boyd's work, there was a great deal more to what John Boyd said and
did than the OODA Loop. For example, we are now told that America's armed
forces simply cannot be challenged by any state opponent on air, land or
sea. What would John Boyd say to that? I can tell you because I often heard
him say it. "When we went into Vietnam, I heard the Pentagon say that
if you have air superiority and land superiority and sea superiority, you
win. Well, in Vietnam we had air superiority and land superiority and sea
superiority, and we lost. So I said to myself that there is obviously something
more to it."

Another of John Boyd's most important contributions to military theory was
his observation that war is waged at three levels, the physical, the mental
and the moral. The physical level is the weakest and the moral level is the
strongest, with the mental in between. How would Boyd assess our performance
thus far in terms of his three levels of war? If we could ask him, I think
his assessment might go something like this:

At the physical level, we won. At the mental level, we just don't know yet,
because we don't know what was going on in the other guy's mind. At the moral
level, we did good by getting rid of Saddam. But now the hard part comes.
Remember, these three levels have to work in harmony. If we come across as
the bully, pushing everyone else around not only in Iraq but all over the
world, it isn't going to work. If we don't let the people of Iraq run their
own country, we're going to lose at the moral level, and then we will lose
at the mental and physical levels too. We'll end up giving ourselves the
whole enchilada right up the poop chute.

Some of the same generals who are now claiming that our initial victory
in Iraq shows we have mastered John Boyd's theory feared and hated the real
John Boyd. For them now to take Boyd's name in vain would not have made John
happy. I can guess what he would have said, but I can't put those words into
print.

William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the
Free Congress Foundation.